Blogs / The Loom

Ryan writes, “I am a mechanical engineer, and this tattoo was inspired by the cover of my mechanical engineering design textbook.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Today at 5 pm EST I am going to be on Science Fantastic, the radio show hosted by physicist Michio Kaku. You can call in at 800-449-8255. Here’s a list of stations that carry the show, either live or repeated later this week.

I’m waiting to board my Air Canada flight to the rain-drenched city of Vancouver. Residents of that fair city are invited to come to the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, dry off for a spell, and hear my talk tomorrow at 7 about Darwin, the flu, and evolution . It’s free, but you have to register here. See you tomorrow.

Math is the subject of my new Discover column on the brain. How do we do it, and when did we (or our primate ancestors) start doing it? The answer, or at least some intriguing new research, is here.

Here’s a fun talk I had Saturday on Science Cabaret, a radio show on WICB in Ithaca. The host, Jennifer Nelson, is a graduate student at Cornell and has only been interviewing people about science for two months, but she’s clearly a natural at this. At the Science Cabaret site, you can listen to her earlier talks, too. Check them out.

Palin “didn’t believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.”

Quoted in Michiko Katutani’s review of Sarah Palin’s new memoir.

This is definitely going into the swine flu talk! From Colin Purrington’s The Axis of Evo.

Tomorrow morning I’m hopping a plane and spending the afternoon at Cornell. On Saturday, I’ll be giving a talk about The Origin of Species just down the road in downtown Ithaca. Caren Cooper, an ornithologist at Cornell, has used my upcoming talk as the hook for a lovely essay in the Ithaca Times about the real wonder of science versus the make-believe of pseudoscience. You can find details about the talk here.

Just a reminder to my fellow Nutmeggers: I will be speaking tomorrow at 5:30 pm at the Peabody Museum at Yale in New Haven. The title of the talk is “Darwin Gets Swine Flu.” Pigs, ducks, sneezes, and more.

Details here.

This post is really just an excuse for me to put up this cool poster. If you want the details on my talk in Vancouver on November 18, you can find them here. Tickets are free, but registration is required.

If you ever find yourself in the forests of Ecuador, you may have the good fortune of spotting a club-winged manakin. The closest the rest of us will probably ever get will be to watch this video. But don’t just watch it. Listen.

If you said to yourself, “Hold on, is that bird singing with its wings?” the answer is yes.

As I wrote in this 2005 article in the New York Times, ornithologists have long known that a few species of manakins can make sounds with their wings. The sounds are produced by the males, as part of their courtship displays. Some make firecracker pops, and some make whooshing sounds. Darwin pointed to the sounds of manakin wings as evidence of just how much sexual selection could transform male animals as females were attracted to some mates over others.

But no one had any idea how manakins could make noises with feathers until Kimberly Bostwick of Cornell and her colleagues tackled the question. Bostwick took a high-speed camera into the jungle to film club-winged manakins. It turns out the birds flap their wings 100 times a second, far faster than typical birds. Later, she closely examined museum specimens. Club-winged manakins have one peculiar wing feather with a stiff, curved tip, right next to one with a series of ridges. Bostwick and her colleagues proposed that curved tips raked across the ridges on the neighboring feather like a spoon pulled across a washboard, producing the bird’s 1500-cycle-per-second sound.

Biologists are quite familiar with this way of making sound–but in crickets and other insects. Typically, they draw their legs across ridges on their exoskeleton, making their bodies resonate in a process called stridulation. Bostwick and her colleagues were proposing, for the first time, that a vertebrate could stridulate, too.

Since Bostwick published her first paper on the birds, she’s continued to study them to test her hypothesis. In a paper just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, she and her colleagues report a new experiment in which they looked at the physics of the manakin feathers. They clamped the feathers in a device known as a vibration mini-shaker, and then–well, as you can guess–shook them. The scientists bounded lasers off the feathers to track their wiggles as the mini-shaker vibrated faster and faster. They used the device first to measure the special spoon-and-washboard pair of feathers. Then they measured how other feathers responded, and then, finally, they studied a set of ordinary and spoon-and-washboard feathers joined together on a ligament.

The scientists found that the spoon-and-washboard feathers resonated at about 1500 cycles, just as Bostwick had predicted back in 2005. The unmodified feathers on other parts of the wing, however, showed no such response when the scientists shook them one by one. But when they shook the spoon-and-washboard feathers together with seven neighboring wing feathers, the entire set resonated strongly at 1500 cycles.

As you can see in this video, the club-winged manakin moves its entire wings upward before flapping. Bostwick proposes that the spoon-and-washboard feathers create a 1500-cycle sound, which the entire wing amplifies. This special kind of stridulation is not totally unique–the Australian whistling moth whistles by clicking castanet-like organs together, causing its entire wings to resonate. What is unique, however, is the evolution of feathers into such a sophisticated sound system.

The winners of this year’s AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award have just been announced. I’m honored to be the winner for large newspapers. (I submitted some of my articles over the past year in The New York Times.)

The whole enterprise of handing out awards for science journalism is fraught with gloomy undertones these days, of course. Last year’s newspaper winners actually lost their jobs by the time the awards were announced. But even as we struggle on, it’s reassuring that there are chances to get some recognition for striving to do our best, to make as much sense of the world as we can manage in plain English. And I’m particularly grateful that the folks at the New York Times indulges me in my curiosity about basic questions about the nature of life–like why fireflies flash.